The Critics Canon: Standards of Theatrical Reviewing in America (Great American Orators,)

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Instead, Tucker argued, the institution of slavery would fail naturally and should therefore not be abruptly dismantled. The Valley of the Shenandoah stands, then, as an important precursor to the rosy moonlight and magnolias model of the plantation novel made popular in the years following its publication. Or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion His depiction of plantation life, while not without its notes of irony, became in many ways a guide for conservative representations of Southern culture. Furthermore, moving beyond the use of the plantation as mere setting, Kennedy casts it instead as the symbolic foundation of an idyllic, chivalric society.

As a space both domestic and commercial, the plantation directly reflects, as Kennedy presents it, the economy in which it operates, and it becomes a framework predicated upon the exploitation of human labor and the subjugation of a race. Set in Virginia in , the text outlines a future war fought between heroic Southern guerillas and a megalomaniacal federal government led by Martin Van Buren who has proclaimed himself the dictator of the United States.

As the rest of the states in this imagined South have already seceded from the union, the plot concerns the fight of these armed forces to free Virginia from the despotic control of the central government. While her early output is morally instructional, her later works demonstrate a strict intent to write to preserve a traditionalist, slavery-centered, agricultural Southern society. Other novels such as V. While a common thread of these works is the narrative of loyal slaves and their benign masters, works such as William M.

Black Acre venture from these well-trodden paths. In this novel, the loyalties and diligence of free workers are pitted against their more loyal, enslaved counterparts. Although the novel does not work to enchant its audience with descriptions of the Southern seat of power, the plantation, this icon nevertheless overshadows the conflict between the two systems of labor.

Carolyn Eastman

A Tale of the South ; G. Generally, these texts focus upon the plantation as a site of Southern power and argue for the benefits of slavery in direct opposition to the portrayals of Southern life found in abolitionist literature. Far more than a mere big farm, the plantation is situated at the epicenter of the Southern imaginative landscape, a cultural imaginary that, in seeking justification for its economic and social institutions, relies heavily upon the fantasy of white supremacy. When the model of its labor regime was recreated in the wake of the Civil War amid efforts to revitalize and modernize the region, the plantation, far from being banished in battle, would find an afterlife in an American political economy reliant upon debt peonage, class stratification, and structural segregation.

The hierarchy of the South in the 19th century is observable through the distribution of power across social groups. White male members of the gentry class possessed the greatest degree of strength due to their ownership of property and status. White females occupying this class, such as the plantation mistress and Southern belle, absorbed power from their male counterparts but were compelled to perform tasks of labor for no compensation and, according to the ideologies of Southern womanhood, submit, not unlike the slave, to the will of the plantation owner.

This role restricted the affluent female Southerner from taking part in the management or ownership of the plantation. White lower-class men possessed significantly less power than did their affluent counterparts.

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Meanwhile, white lower-class women were denied credit for their work in the home and offered only a limited range of domestic positions, such as those of seamstress or millworker. Black women were treated as sexual objects available for exploitation or as sexless mammies utilized as a negative contrast to white female purity. While there was little or no chance of upward mobility in this gendered and raced caste system, there did exist many opportunities for downward mobility as a repercussion of challenging these social boundaries. While Southern intellectuals predominantly denied any moral dilemma regarding the institution of slavery, influential suffragists and women writers began to recognize and highlight the struggles and oppressive forces common to both slavery and the subjugation of women.

Writers such as Augusta Jane Evans worked against social norms, opposing the education of women while supporting the institution of slavery. Such a position naturally affected her interpretation and perpetuation of the cult of white Southern womanhood. In her most successful work of Civil War propaganda, Macaria , Southern women are compelled to sacrifice themselves for the Confederate cause. Such focus upon the honor of the Southern female and her symbolic role in saving, preserving, or restoring the honor of the Confederacy quickly became a common trope of Southern literature.

Sisters raised in a slave-holding family in South Carolina, they eventually relocated to Pennsylvania where their faith and connection to the Quaker community informed their beliefs in gender equality and the immorality of slavery. Publishing their thoughts in the form of tracts, edited collections of newspaper stories, and letters, the sisters tirelessly worked to spread dissenting views on race and gender. Their persistence did not wane in their final years. Instead, they focused on educating others and continuing their fight for gender and racial equality.

Biographical and autobiographical texts from the Civil War era demonstrate the efforts of white Southern women to subvert Southern norms of gender and racial oppression. In her journal posthumously published in , Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina presents an acute analysis of the class system of the South during the Civil War.

Her journal, which includes entries from February 18, , to June 26, , details gender roles and class-based struggles to survive during a time of social upheaval and violence. Critical of the complications brought on by slavery, Chesnut focuses especially upon the abuse of black women and the power granted white men.

One of her chief concerns is the fathering of mixed-race children by white male planters and the problematic networks of power and sexuality embedded in such a relationship. While largely avoiding controversy and treating the war as a backdrop for the experiences and ideals of upper-class Southern Jewish women during the war, Pember nevertheless produces a rendering of how women during wartime transgressed gender norms and obtained power not usually made available to them. In her position as one of five Chief Matrons at the hospital, Pember occupied a position rarely available to women prior to the war.

In recounting her work, Pember charts her efforts to escape oppressive forces that worked to restrict her social mobility because she was both a Jew and a woman. Some notable literature of the Confederacy remained largely unknown for a generation or longer, hidden away in journals, letters, and diaries, such as those by Sarah Morgan Dawson and Kate Stone. The Journal of Kate Stone , which recalls life in a northern Louisiana plantation, is also marked by a facility for realistic description, as she chronicles everyday details of life from to , narrating not only details about plantation management, farming, and slave conduct but also the intricacies of her domestic and imaginative life.

While demonstrating loyalty to her state of Virginia, McDonald also considers it her obligation to condemn slavery as both immoral and archaic. Additionally, she articulates her fears that her own affluent social position will be threatened by large-scale changes to the economic framework of the South. As a founding member of the American Colonization Society, she offered to pay the fare of any freed African American who desired to return to Africa, and she pushed for the education of former slaves.

Her children adopted her views, and her family liquidated their estates to avoid the use of slave labor. Through their work, these authors illustrate the vast range of attitudes toward race and gender prevalent in the 19th-century South. While some leading female voices of this period, such as the Grimke sisters, boldly supported suffragist and abolitionist policies, others, such as Augusta Jane Evans, called for the rights of women while overlooking the oppressive qualities of the slave industry.

The writings of Cornelia Peake McDonald add further complexity to this historical lens as she presents her negotiations of ethical dilemmas regarding race, her fear that she will lose her class standing upon the alteration of the slave economic system, and her loyalty to the state of Virginia. What is evident then is that, while formations of race and sexuality were employed as a means to naturalize the social order of the region, attitudes toward such socially constructed hierarchies were far from ubiquitously positive. In contrast to romantic plantation literature, humor writing explored the comical, grotesque, and unruly possibilities of the Southern frontier.

In this quickly vanishing wilderness, stereotypes such as the frontiersman and black minstrel emerged, forming tropes that would significantly influence American humor writing. As a result, Southern humor writing in many ways challenged common conventions of literature in the region during the first half of the century. Drawing upon his experiences in rural Georgia, Longstreet crafted a text in the realist tradition that celebrates the dialect and local color of the region. Typically credited as the first successful Southern humor text, the collection also produced a widespread comic device that focused on the humorous interactions between two deeply contrasting characters, such as the respectable farmer and his counterpart, the rough-necked backwoodsman.

Incorporating sketches illustrating the comical interactions of rural characters, Longstreet captured humorous scenes of Southern life that, while less popular in the South, were widely accepted by readers outside the region. Writing in a style deeply influenced by Longstreet, lawyer, newspaper editor, and humorist Johnson Jones Hooper drew from personal experiences in his own comical writings. Acclaimed for its humorous portrayal of the citizens of Tallapoosa County, the story brought Hooper into the national spotlight. Following this success, Hooper began publishing comical stories involving his most popular character, Simon Suggs.

Eventually the stories of the mischievous Suggs garnered enough popularity to necessitate a collection, resulting in the publication of The Adventures of Simon Suggs Continuing the comedic tradition led by Longstreet that democratized depictions of Southern life and challenged gender and class assumptions of the region, Hooper created in Simon Suggs a timeless trickster and exemplar of the various strains of thought and ideals often concealed in Southern texts. In following the antics of prankster Sut Lovingood, the text lampoons the prejudices of city dwelling citizens toward their rural counterparts.

Such humorous critical commentary moves beyond this scope to challenge ideals of social, religious, and political authority. Shrugging off socially constructed ideals of morality and respectability, Sut lives according to those natural desires his fellow citizens deride and seek to control.

Accepting of his own shortcomings and flaws, he works to expose the hypocrisies of those who seek to patrol morality. In this way, the characters of Hooper and Harris, at times uncouth or even vile, strongly impacted humorous sketches of Southern life in subsequent American fiction. While containing some elements common to the humor writing of Harris, Longstreet, and Hooper, the works of attorney and author Joseph G.

Baldwin in many ways move beyond this scope of writing. Couching indictments of political and social practices in humorous contexts, his most popular work, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches , illustrates the possibilities the genre provides for serious social commentary. His reflections on such topics, in turn, include his opinions concerning the state of American affairs. Although his writings fit him well within the tradition of American humor, his use of the genre as a tool for discussions of larger social issues creates for him a unique place within the literary canon.

Yet the inclusion of social commentary within humor writing is not limited to progressive critical reflections. In the widely popular collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings , Harris presents didactic stories he claimed to have gathered from the slaves he met while working on a plantation as a young man. Although many readers at the time understood the collection to be a sympathetic, unprejudiced account of African-American folktales, contemporary audiences object to several aspects of the text. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.

Using humor to present a sanitized portrait of American slavery, he demonstrates the possibilities for ideological proselytization provided by the humor-writing genre. Some of the characteristics prevalent in the works of Southern humor writers later rose to prominence as a literary style in the years following the Civil War, achieving dominance in the s and s. This style, generally referred to as local color fiction, focused upon the dialect, perspectives, and landscapes of the Southern region. Its popularity across sections in the United States is attributable in many ways to regional curiosity and feelings of reconciliation that followed the Civil War, emotions that fueled the production and publication of local color fiction as northern periodicals sought local tales of Southern life for their curious audiences.

These portraits of Southern life focus on the antebellum spaces of the plantation and farm but include a notable shift in perspective from those texts published in the years leading up to the Civil War. In local color texts, defensiveness is often minimized and, in contrast to the broader conventions of antebellum literature, focus is given to those individuals situated at the bottom of the social hierarchy, including slaves, former slaves, and impoverished white Southerners. In this way, writers of local color fiction crafted portraits of the South that satisfied the desires of a national audience and adapted to the new expectations of a national market.

Yet, despite this tendency, some of these writers did, in fact, attend to the social problems plaguing the region. Foremost among the local colorist writers was an author who only later would be recognized as one of the most important in American literature, Mark Twain. In the immediate years that followed, Twain garnered critical acclaim with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and subsequently published The Prince and the Pauper and the travel text A Tramp Abroad It was the publication of his next work of fiction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , that, for many critics, solidified his place within American literature.

Capturing the moral conundrums experienced by a young boy in the Antebellum South, Twain imbeds within local color fiction complex questions concerning race and the legitimacy of social moral frameworks. Through this approach to issues of Southern culture, Twain demonstrates how radical ingredients of social critique were possible for a typically conservative genre of fiction. In mocking romantic ideals of chivalry and the historically tense relationship between religion and science, for example, he assumes the role of iconoclast, exposing the hypocrisies of prevailing social narratives.

While many local color writers avoided controversial matters in their writing, authors other than Mark Twain caused controversy in their critiques of Southern society.

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A significant example of such political and activist writing exists in the works of George Washington Cable. A local color writer who focused his energies upon Creole culture in New Orleans, Cable became perhaps the most significant Southern writer at the turn of the century. Initially garnering popularity with novels and short fiction collections chronicling the cultural practices of Creole New Orleans, Cable was the author of pieces and collections, both fictional and nonfictional, including Old Creole Days , The Grandissimes , Madame Delphine , and Dr.

Sevier , which captured scenes of New Orleans life in the final decades of the 18th century and the early 19th century. Generally considered the most powerful voice in Southern literature at the end of the 19th century, Cable, often recognized for his progressive views toward race, was in many ways torn between his love of Southern culture and his abhorrence of its ubiquitous racist ideologies.

His novel The Grandissimes , for example, analyzes the roles of prejudice and racial pride in the decline of Creole culture.

In criticizing Creole attitudes concerning skin tone, Cable connects such systems of prejudice with the white supremacist values of the larger Southern culture at the time. While his fictional works question the normative values of Southern culture, Cable became a controversial figure after publishing several collections of progressive essays concerning race relations and civil rights in the South. In this final, ambivalent segment of his career, his works included essays that advocated for reform of the region and, conversely, romantic works of fiction focused upon an illusory, idealized past in Southern history.

The aforementioned short story, later developed into her first novel, Monsieur Motte , reimagines the relationship between slave and master as a natural, benevolent arrangement. In the revisionist tradition, King defends the legacy of slavery by romanticizing the legacy of the antebellum South.

While her work includes a large range of local color elements, they frequently move beyond the exotic to include themes of womanhood, voice, and female experiences, both black and white. Her interest in examining black and white experiences was further developed in a second novel, The Pleasant Ways of St. In following two impoverished families on opposing sides of the color line, the text considers the struggles of survival during Reconstruction. As a historian, cultural critic, writer, and cultural ambassador, King drew from her experiences during and after the Civil War to produce texts that, while historically placed within the region, in many ways revise history.

As seen in the works of Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and Grace King, some local colorists utilized the genre as a framework for introducing ideals from progressive and traditional political and social perspectives Still, many practitioners of this writing style avoided controversy in their literary careers. James Lane Allen, for example, worked to satisfy the desires of popular audiences with his apolitical and noncontroversial material. His focus upon nature and his belief in its role, in the tradition of romanticism, as provider of spiritual provisions, led him to a deep interest in the landscapes of his home state, Kentucky.

Likewise, writer Mary Noailles Murfree focused her attentions upon themes native to her state of Tennessee that celebrated local culture and lacked critical reflection. Specifically, her works focus on the lives of mountain-dwelling Tennesseans in the latter half of the 19th century. Her portrayal of these societies operates within the conventions of local color as it presents as exotic a segment of Southern society to a larger, national audience. Using her knowledge of mountaineer dialects and culture, she developed stories that reflected her central belief that such communities were fascinating because they remained untouched by modern civilization.

The unique experiences of Kate Chopin, for example, thoroughly prepared her for a successful career as a writer of this style. Personal experiences such as her upbringing in a family with strong French and Irish influences, her childhood and youth spent growing up in St. Louis, and her life with husband Oscar Chopin in New Orleans all informed her ability to develop cultural sketches of varying locales.

Louis in , she began utilizing this gift as a means to avoid financial ruin. By the early s, she found success writing articles, translations, and short stories for periodicals including the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch and Vogue. Yet critics of her work often qualified their praise as being strictly for her gifts as a local color writer. However, with the publication of two story collections, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie , she gained a substantial national audience. Set in Louisiana, the first collection focuses on the people of the Cane River country and the economic and social boundaries against which they revolt. These collections were followed by her controversial second novel, The Awakening While her first novel, At Fault , was generally unnoticed by the public, this second work, set in New Orleans and invested in complex moral issues, was widely condemned for its perceived immoral and vulgar themes.

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In charting the radical actions of a woman within an oppressive patriarchal society, Chopin captured in her fiction feminist ideals that, while rejected in her lifetime, brought the resurrection of her work during the midth century. Recognized posthumously as a classic author and voice of feminist concerns, Chopin demonstrates in her work the powerful pairing of social and politically aware consciousness with the dialect, rich descriptions, and cultural distillations of local color fiction.

Revisionist writers have long reimagined the antebellum South as a location not of exploitation, violence, and racial subjugation but rather as a site of ideal womanhood, chivalry, and a spiritual connection to the land. Such efforts are most visible in the decades following the war. Such ideologies constitute the cult of the Lost Cause that dominated Southern literature in the latter decades of the 19th century. To fully comprehend its significant within the postbellum period, it is necessary to first consider those authors who, while writing during the Civil War, acted as precursors to this apologist aesthetic.

Writers of the brief Confederate era are largely unknown to contemporary audiences. While their absence from popular thought has a great deal to do with their support for slavery and secession, their historical fall from public light was not simply a moral issue. In the decade following the Civil War, the infrastructure of the region was devastated and publishing houses were largely unavailable. Although their devastation following the war was in many ways economical, their moral positions insured their obscurity in contemporary considerations of Southern literature.

In addition to these fictional imaginings of the earliest episodes of American history, he also placed his stories within the American War for Independence of which he had heard stories from his grandmother as a child. In fact, Americans came to feel that political oratory and political debate were of such importance to the public that after the war, architects added seating areas or galleries from which members of the public could listen to and judge the respective positions put forward during political battles Fliegelman, ; Looby, In each of these areas—preaching styles, modes of pedagogy, and popular politics—oratory became more significant as a medium of communication during the eighteenth century, even as literacy levels rose throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world.

Looking broadly at the changing importance of oratory as well as innovations by individual speakers within the medium, we can see that it grew in influence over a wide swath of the public. George Washington made a retiring and awkward speaker, Thomas Jefferson could barely speak above a whisper, and the former lawyer John Adams was divisive and abrasive rather than persuasive. In fact, the American who gained the most fame as an eloquent orator before the s was Native American.

Richard H. Palmer

There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creatures. Inasmuch as Americans believed that their new republic required fine orators as leaders, it took more than thirty years after the Revolution for such figures to appear on the political scene Eastman, One of the first figures to inspire new forms of public speech by combining oratory and improvisational performative innovation was a Scottish immigrant named James Ogilvie, who had taught school in Virginia for fifteen years and who, after ample experience with elocutionary methods, was determined to make a living as an itinerant orator.

He does not form an ethical treatise; he exhibits a picture of life, he chooses rather to describe than to reason, and his descriptions are glowing, pathetic, and impressive. Capitol building before an audience that included President Madison and both houses of Congress and spent a term at the South Carolina College later the University of South Carolina teaching students the art of oratory. Along the way, he fostered a national conversation about the importance of oratory in a republic Eastman, At the same time Ogilvie became a household name he sparked emulation; after departing a city, local newspapers displayed advertisements for new debating societies, lyceums, orators who imitated his style and even his costume, a toga , and schools for elocution and dramatic recitation.

Several of these individuals were celebrated in Edward G. When Ogilvie continued his lecture tour in England and Scotland in , he found a public similarly eager for various forms of performative and educational oratory, as a contemporaneous movement was underway in Britain. As such, the book placed strongest emphasis on the literary or political quality of the texts. About a speech by Sir Dudley Digges from the early seventeenth century, Hazlitt wrote: He also included reflections on the art and craft of oratory:. To be a great orator does not require the highest faculties of the human mind, but it requires the highest exertion of the common faculties of our nature.

He keeps upon the surface, he stands firm upon the ground, but his form is majestic, and his eye sees far and near: Hazlitt, , II: In Britain as in the United States, which saw the end of almost all restrictions on the white male vote by the s, these changes made political oratory more vital to the overall political system. They also rendered public opinion more important, as the relative powers of the aristocracy and social elites declined. Reflecting those democratizing changes, journalists in both countries began to pay close attention to governmental debate and to reprint versions of those speeches in the public prints.

Print media helped to cultivate a strong sense that the public ought to scrutinize the speeches of their political leaders. By the s, newspapers developed methods of obtaining full transcripts of major orations—at first by requesting the text from the speakers and, eventually, by training their staff in shorthand to sit in political chambers and record them. As newspapers columns ballooned with these accounts, politicians paid ever more attention to the crafting of their speeches, competing for the admiration of the public and the support for their causes that it generated. Public attention to political oratory also raised the bar for the vocal delivery by speakers during the nineteenth century.

As Josephine Hoegaerts has demonstrated, members of the House of Commons now paid extraordinary attention to the fine details of their delivery—the acoustic and somatic aspects of how parliamentary discourse sounded and resonated. Speakers carefully managed their bodies and voices, seeking to convey authoritative, masculine power and privilege, while also appealing to new constituencies of the public.

Also highly attuned to public opinion were the social reformers, who, increasingly during the s and s, began to use print and oral media on an unprecedented level to persuade the public of the need for change. Whether advocating for temperance, ending prostitution, founding Sunday schools, arguing for world peace, or opposing slavery, reformers mobilized a barrage of media to draw public attention to their causes. They published reform tracts and periodicals in unprecedented variety and numbers; orators for those causes found vivid ways to heighten the emotional stakes of these social problems.

Inspired by dramatic preachers of the Second Great Awakening whose styles and messages appealed to a large percentage of the American middle class, reform orators anchored their social improvement causes to a powerful sense of urgency for Christian uplift and religious expansion. As the world of reform grew ever more crowded with seemingly urgent causes, reformers found innovative ways to fight for the attention of the public. Temperance leader John B. Gough, for example, advocated for his cause by telling his own story of salvation from the evils of drink as a confession, a narrative of an agonizing fall into drunkenness and the difficult road to sobriety and religious salvation.

In many ways, Gough created the self-help story, combining the most compelling aspects of the self-made man style of autobiography with a performance of the reformed drunkard. He exemplified the message of personal action and self-improvement as a response to social ills, repeating his tale of suffering more than 11, times to audiences throughout the United States, England, and Europe. Meanwhile, abolitionist orators developed different means of challenging their audiences as their sense of moral urgency increased. They often adopted confrontational modes of address—even more confrontational than had previously been seen in enthusiastic, doomsaying camp revivals—accusing their auditors of sinfulness or of promoting slavery simply through inaction.

These rhetorical strategies represented a newly aggressive philosophy by reformers, organized around the understanding that the public needed to be jogged out of their moral complacency. William Lloyd Garrison acknowledged the seemingly contradictory nature of a reform strategy that held up both perfect adherence to Christian morality and sometimes vicious rhetorical attacks on people deemed opponents of the cause. Religious and reform orators looked strikingly different from orators of a generation earlier by class, race, and gender. Whereas once an oratorical education—and the innate sense of authority required to deliver public speeches—was limited to elites, many other people began to find a calling to ascend to the podium during the long nineteenth century.

John Gough was one of many working- and middle-class men whose talents in public speaking helped to raise him to public notoriety. The British abolitionist George Thompson, who made several speaking tours to the United States, came from a poor family and received little formal education but was able to educate himself and ultimately hire an elocution teacher to help him gain the confidence to address audiences. Others experienced a powerful religious calling to speak that they found disturbingly insistent.

Lee even wondered whether it was Satan, rather than God, who instructed her Lee, When she, Sojourner Truth, or one of the other many women, African Americans, and uneducated white men spoke from the pulpit or the podium, they often encountered strong opposition even as they embodied radical ideas about who might legitimately address the public at large, ultimately helping to change the face of American culture and society Merrill, A wide range of speakers grew common especially within the world of commercialized oratory—lyceum lectures, Chautauqua oratory, theatrical and dramatic readings, and other forms of ticketed performance—and, over time, these speakers increasingly assumed a fascinating range of subject positions.

Brady notes Brady, The male speaker Bayard Taylor performed accounts of his world travels in the full ethnic costume of the different cultures he visited Gibian, In short, the lyceum became a dynamic site for a degree of play with regard to gender, race, and national identities. Some of the most influential scholars to study the nineteenth-century cult of oratory emphasized its nation-building effects: On a local level, the appearance of a famous speaker had the capacity to galvanize a public in a region, giving them the chance to experience something together and on a regular basis, regardless of their denominational differences.

Indeed, lyceum lecturers were carefully instructed to select topics that avoided any form of partisan or religious discussion, such as the divisive subject of slavery. But those experiences also had national implications. Seeing a traveling orator perform made for a unique experience in the United States in the s and s: Oratory as fostered and disseminated by the lyceum thus played an important role in helping to create a mass public in the long nineteenth century.

Some of the most exciting new scholarship has taken a transnational turn. Increasingly, scholars are seeking to understand better the transnational careers of popular speakers and the different resonances of their talks in a wide variety of settings as part of a widespread academic trend to view historical movements beyond the confines of national borders.

In the collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America , the authors build on, rather than reject, the previous emphasis on oratory as nation-building. Wright notes in his introduction. In each of these realms—politics, religion, education, and theater, as well as commercialized oratory, such as the lyceum and Chautauqua circuits—oratory became more important throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such that it became a primary medium of communication even before the advent of recording or amplifying technologies.

Scholars from a wide spectrum of humanistic and social science fields have explored important aspects of this historic trend, as we have seen. The pervasive orality of public life and communication pales when we consider the voluminous scholarly attention given to one of the other major forms of media during these centuries: This area has proven to be an important touchstone for scholars of the spoken word, particularly as many of their sources on oratory derive from extant printed sources. The Impact of Printing, — , an extensive body of work has emerged from scholars in history, American studies, and literature departments, as well as from rare book collectors, librarians, and bibliographers.

This literature has served as a model for its exceptional cross-fertilization in methods and theories between disciplines, but even more so for the way it has compelled all scholars to see that printed materials had meaning and history beyond merely the text they contained. The scholarly focus on print culture has proven to be a capacious arena in which to offer new theoretical and methodological insights that reflect the many disciplines that contribute, while also providing networks for scholarly exchange to foster new work and share methods and theories.

Indeed, the literature on print culture might serve as a model for providing a central scholarly focus that ties together this shared scholarly pursuit. By focusing on the creators and consumers of print culture, this work has sought to explore the many surprising meanings and uses of print. To be sure, scholarship that has treated the history of oratory has increasingly borrowed from the literature on print culture, not least because so many scholars have found important interconnections between these two media.

Indeed, it has increasingly become nearly impossible to write about public speaking without acknowledging how much it developed mutually with print culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—considering the ways that George Whitefield circulated news and enthusiasm about his upcoming revivals, how youth learned the art of oratory by reading about it in schoolbooks, or how political speeches appeared in full in print shortly after their delivery, as we have seen. Some of the topics that concern scholars of platform culture most fundamentally, such as audience reception and the evolution of oratorical celebrity, are subjects richly treated by scholars of print culture as well.

Books continue to matter, of course, but not in the way that earlier generations took for granted. Dylan, they contend, is one of the greatest poets this nation has ever produced in point of fact, he has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature every year since The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit t eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true makers of creative work were poets, and what they aspired to was not literature but poesy.

So when did literature in the modern sense begin? Ross is citing with theatrical flair the case of Donaldson v. It became literature rather than poetry. Canonization, of course, also referred to the Catholic practice of designating saints, but the term was not applied to secular writings until , when the Dutch classicist David Ruhnken spoke of a canon of ancient orators and poets.

In effect, the canon formalized modern literature as a select body of imaginative writings that could stand up to the Greek and Latin texts. Although exclusionary by nature, it was originally intended to impart a sense of unity; critics hoped that a tradition of great writers would help create a national literature. The canon anointed the worthy and, by implication, the unworthy, functioning as a set of commandments that saved people the trouble of deciding what to read.

While books were conceived in private, they reflected the ideological makeup of their host culture; and the criticism that gave them legitimacy served only to justify the prevailing social order.

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